Locked Up and Patted Down: A Year of Making U.S. Safer

By TODD S. PURDUM

Published: September 9, 2002

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — Cockpit doors are stronger, but not all cargo is screened for bombs. The directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency now jointly brief the president on terrorist threats, but there are still critical gaps in intelligence gathering and analysis. The Super Bowl has become a superfortress, but the local cineplex remains a soft target. The government issues a rolling rainbow of threat alerts, but Congress and the White House are still battling over the creation of an agency to coordinate security.

One year after the worst terrorist attacks on United States soil, Americans are safer but still far from safe.

In recent days, the top Bush administration officials charged with securing the nation at home and abroad have all cited progress but also acknowledged the continuing threat in their public comments. Tom Ridge, the homeland security chief, considers another attack almost certain. Vice President Dick Cheney says the problem is "obviously not" solved, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, says "there will continue to be vulnerability."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said: "I think we're clearly safer than we were a year ago, because the No. 1 force that could hurt us, Al Qaeda, while not destroyed, is on the run. And over all, the war on terrorism overseas is going quite well. But you worry three to five years from now whether we'll be safe when the next Al Qaeda arrives, because what we're doing domestically to make ourselves safer is very halting, slow and incomplete."

The Immigration and Naturalization service has put the names of more than 300,000 foreigners with criminal records into the F.B.I. database, so law enforcement can track them. But it still has no precise count of foreign students who have overstayed or violated their visas.

The F.B.I. has reassigned hundreds of agents to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks and has redirected resources in an effort to prevent future ones. But the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, has said that he cannot be certain that the government will thwart another attack, which many officials regard as almost certain.

The C.I.A. is trying to recruit more people fluent in Arabic but still has a critical shortage of sources who have actually penetrated terrorist cells. Although the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have made some strides in coordinating their intelligence gathering and analysis, and more federal agencies, especially the Pentagon, are vying to collect intelligence on terrorists, rivalries among federal agencies still hobble timely analysis and coherent dissemination of the stream of overseas intelligence that floods into the government.

Safety, of course, cannot be guaranteed, especially in a democracy that holds individual freedom among its most cherished values. The real issue is whether the institutions of American life have taken reasonable precautions to protect the public; for the most part, neither the government nor private organizations have taken more than the first halting steps.

Washington is spending about $1 billion a year on programs aimed at keeping nuclear material out of terrorists' hands, but experts say the efforts are uncoordinated. The Federation of American Scientists has just issued a report concluding that emergency workers around the nation still lack training to deal with an attack using weapons of mass destruction.

Baltimore now tests its drinking water three times a day, instead of once, but assessments of the vulnerability of water systems nationwide are not even scheduled for completion until next year.

Over all, the Bush administration has sought to roughly double spending on counterterrorism efforts at home and abroad, to $45 billion next year. But President Bush has threatened to veto the Senate version of the bill creating his Department of Homeland Security on the ground that it maintains civil service rules that he says hamstring managers' ability to fire or promote workers.

"Safer compared to what?" asked Ivo H. Daalder, an expert at the Brookings Institution here. "I would argue safer compared to Sept. 10. We are more likely to make it more difficult, but it doesn't mean we're not going to be attacked. It doesn't mean we're safe. We're not."

Mr. Ridge's office has compiled a list of 71 signs of "progress since Sept. 11," including the expanded use of air marshals, the arrests of more than 500 illegal immigrants on a variety of charges and the restructured counterterrorism efforts at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.

But many of the 71 items are still only proposals, and with the vast bulk of the nation's vital infrastructure — including shipping, banking, communication networks, power grids and transportation — under private, not public, control, measuring comprehensive progress is all but impossible.

The fiscal and economic aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks has left about half of all United States cities less able to meet their financial needs, according to a recent survey by the National League of Cities. Two-thirds cited a need for more money for equipment and training to support local efforts. While 80 percent of all cities cited cyberterrorism as a concern, barely a quarter of cities reported that their contingency plans addressed that problem.